Exhibitions

New Voices, New Relationships

Mov­ing sto­ries of women from all over the world who have made Alice Springs their home and over­come social, cul­tur­al and lan­guage barriers.

What would it take for you to leave your home­land and trav­el great dis­tances to anoth­er coun­try, know­ing you may nev­er return?

What would you choose to take with you?

What might your migra­tion mean for oth­ers already liv­ing where you chose to go?

Explore the delights and dif­fi­cul­ties which arise when humans leave their home­lands to inhab­it the home­lands of others.

Sto­ries are told through reflec­tions on objects from ​“before” and by women com­ing togeth­er to cook and share bread from their dif­fer­ent cultures.

These women acknowl­edge that regard­less of where they have come from, they have all made their homes on the land of Arrernte people.

Pathee and sukun­da from Nepal, select­ed by Mona for the New Voic­es, New Rela­tion­ships exhibition

We have giv­en a lot of thought to how muse­ums might tell these sto­ries. We want to be care­ful that we don’t sim­pli­fy, decon­tex­tu­al­ize or re-imag­ine the expe­ri­ences of the women who share their sto­ries in the exhibition.

Through images, objects and texts, muse­ums do not sim­ply pre­serve and re-enact an ​‘objec­tive’ past but can (delib­er­ate­ly or inad­ver­tent­ly) con­tribute to the cre­ation of a one-dimen­sion­al his­to­ry and nation­al identity.

New Voic­es, New Rela­tion­ships shows the glob­al moti­va­tions for migra­tion, cross­ing coun­try, cul­ture and dif­fer­ent peri­ods of time. It also pro­vides a reflec­tive and safe space to think about how cul­tur­al her­itage, lan­guages, beliefs and fam­i­ly con­nec­tions influ­ence our self-per­cep­tions and our per­cep­tions of oth­er peo­ple – per­cep­tions that can lead to dis­cov­ery, con­fu­sion, prej­u­dice, under­stand­ing and/​or acceptance.

These sto­ries are the new voic­es of our muse­um. More fun­da­men­tal­ly, though, are the new rela­tion­ships that have been nur­tured as we have worked togeth­er, rela­tion­ships between our­selves, the women whose sto­ries we tell and the Arrernte women on whose home­lands we all now live. It is our hope that, in the same way, this exhi­bi­tion nur­tures new rela­tion­ships between all of us and our visitors.